News Room

Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, said Nov. 24 that no spread of COVID-19 had been linked to voting in North Carolina. The NCSBE also said in a news release that there have been zero clusters of COVID-19 connected to voting sites in North Carolina. Are these claims accurate, and what counts as a “cluster”? Does that mean there weren’t any coronavirus cases connected to voting at all?

The United States is potentially days away from approving the first round of coronavirus vaccines just nine months after the global pandemic ripped through every state, claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and crippled the once robust economy. And yet, millions have vowed not to take the fast-developed two-shot vaccines despite 95% efficacy rates from pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNTech and another from Moderna. Why the hesitancy and how long could the COVID-19 crisis continue as a result?

Weeks before states expect to receive their first shipments of Covid-19 vaccines, conflicting messages from the federal government have obscured exactly how many doses may arrive. Some governors, including New York’s Andrew Cuomo and California’s Gavin Newsom, have made splashy announcements about how much of Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE’s vaccines they expect should the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorize them this month. Other states can’t provide a solid answer given how quickly estimates change.

With two vaccines expected to receive federal approval in the U.S. within a matter of weeks, hopes for beating the coronavirus are looking up. Yet for millions of workers and businesses, the emerging treatments also raise a host of questions, not the least of which is this: Can your employer require that you get vaccinated? For now, vaccination plans are focused on prioritizing who will receive the first doses, beginning with those who are most vulnerable as well as most exposed to the disease. But employers will soon have to consider how to communicate with their workforces about the vaccine and decide whether to require staffers to get vaccinated as part of their duty to keep their workers, clients and communities safe.

Adoption of telemedicine in emergency departments leads to better quality of care and patient satisfaction, according to a new study published in the INFORMS Journal Information Systems Research. Emergency room telemedicine adoption shortened average length of stay and wait time significantly based on New York emergency room data from 2010 to 2014. This is a crucial finding as emergency departments face overcrowding and critical shortages of emergency care physicians, particularly as COVID-19 stresses hospital capacity across the country.